Sustainability and Well-being - Frameworks for an integrated approach
Multi-organizational frameworks for digital information sustainability
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20-Oct-2014 -
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Transcript of Multi-organizational frameworks for digital information sustainability
Cherie EdmondsCatherine Hrbal
Chisheng Li
Multi-organizational Frameworks for
Sustainability
Main Themes
YorkChallenges in developing a large-scale digitzation effort - looking at HathiTrust
HathiTrust WebsiteCurrent governance and cost of digital preservation efforts
Walter & SkinnerCreates incentive by looking at costs of NOT preserving - MetaArchive Cooperative as community-operated model
Blue Ribbon Task Force Report - Chapters 4 & 5
Challenges behind a digital preservation project, talks about incentives, and gives simple recommendations and pragmatic small steps you can take to get a project running
Important Terms
Barriers to Entry - tangible costs and challenges to start a project
Benign Neglect - choosing not to focus on preservation today
Contributing Partner - contribute content and pay infrastructure costs for deposited content
Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) - includes the Big Ten schools and University of Chicago
Economy of Scale - cost advantage to lower both the average and marginal costs of preservation in a large repository
MetaArchive Cooperative - community-owned and operated distributed digital preservation network
Misaligned Incentives –each participant in a transaction has their own incentives to act. Each party’s incentives are not the same, and sometimes they conflict.
Important Terms cont.
Negative Benefits - looking at the cost of NOT preserving as incentive to do digital preservation
Non-Exclusive License - rights of the authors to deposit publications into third party repositories
Sustaining Partner - participate in curation and management, but do not necessarily contribute content
Trusted Digital Repository - certified by TRAC or DRAMBORA whose criteria are based off metadata and formatting standards and best practices
Uncertain Future Value - intangible long-term benefits and costs, unable to gauge the benefits for future
Zero-Sum Activity - time and money invested into preservation is taken directly from other activities
Blue Ribbon Task Force
There is a disruption of roles and responsibilities among players, resulting from the non-rivalrous nature of digital information
Chapter four outlined four types of digital information and the challenges and proposed recommendations for each
Scholarly Discourse
Misaligned incentives
• Publisherso have high incentives to preserve these
materialso have shown little resistance to participating
in dark archive models
• Authors/ Creatorso should stipulate perpetual, non exclusive
license to their workso collective bargaining to secure these rightso individual use of these licenses could lower
barriers to preservation of emerging literature
• Librarieso mediation
Question:
Do you think collective bargaining would be effective to help lower barriers to entry for emerging authors? Do you think this tactic is feasible?
Free rider problem large startup costs create barriers to entry no one wants the be the first mover
Uncertain future value secondary and tertiary uses of the information
Fundingthe current models exclude a significant portion of the scholarly community:
smaller publishers under-resourced fields independent scholars and the commercial sector
Action Agenda for Scholarly Discourse
1. Libraries, scholars, and professional societies should develop selection criteria for emerging genres in scholarly discourse, and prototype preservation and access strategies to support them.
2. Publishers reserving the right to preserve should partner with third-party archives or libraries to ensure long-term preservation.
3. Scholars should consider granting nonexclusive rights to publish and preserve, to enable decentralized and distributed preservation of emerging scholarly discourse.
4. Libraries should create a mechanism to organize and clarify their governance issues and responsibilities to preserve monographs and emerging scholarly discourse along lines similar to those for e-journals.
5. All open-access strategies that assume the persistence of information over time must consider provisions for the funding of preservation.
Research Data
Research data vary enormously
Often a need to preserve ancillary materials, such as lab notebooks
Secondary uses of public research data suggest a new users willing to support long-term access to the data
Preservation societies and other proxy organizations can play crucial roles in selection for preservation
In grant-funded research, preservation is framed as a zero-sum game
Imposition of mandates will strengthen incentives• clear allocation of funds ( via a portion of the grant)• clear selection criteria
Funders should be seeding capacity Subscription models help mitiagte the
free-rider problem There should be agreements in place
between the data community and third-party archives
Action Agenda for Research Data
1. Each domain, through professional societies or other consensus making bodies, should set priorities for data selection, level of curation, and length of retention.
2. Funders should impose preservation mandates, when appropriate. When mandates are imposed, funders should also specify selection criteria, funds to be used, and responsible organizations to provide archiving.
3. Funding agencies should explicitly recognize “data under stewardship” as a core indicator of scientific effort and include this information in standard reporting mechanisms.
4. Preservation services should reduce curation and archiving costs by leveraging economies of scale when possible.
5. Agreements with third-party archives should stipulate processes, outcomes, retention periods, and handoff triggers.
Commercially Owned Cultural Content
Who owns it? Misalignment between owners and controllers of digital content arise in almost every case
Creates widespread disruption of business models that provide the primary incentives for commercial owners to preserve
Must strengthen the rights of preserving institutions by revising copyright law
o mandate deposit of copyrighted electronic content into authorize public institutions to secure their lone-term preservation
o provide incentives directly to private owners of cultural assets to preserve on the public's behalf
o commercial sponsorship of preservation activities and public-private partnerships
o stewardship organizations should begin selecting privately held materials of signigicant cultural value
Question:
Could commercial sponsorship of preservation activities be feasible? What might some of the tradeoffs be?
Action Agenda for Commercially Owned Cultural
Content1. Leading cultural organizations should convene expert
communities to address the selection and preservation needs of commercially owned cultural content and digital orphans.
2. Regulatory authorities should bring current requirements for mandatory copyright deposit into harmony with the demands of digital preservation and access.
3. Regulatory authorities should provide financial and other incentives to preserve privately held cultural content in the public interest.
4. Leading stewardship organizations should model and test mechanisms to ensure flexible long-term public-private partnerships that foster cooperative preservation of privately held materials in the public interest.
Collectively Produced Web Content
No clarity about what specific content should be collected
Institutions that are already crawling the web should provide leadership to others
Collective content may be a composite of linked product with compound rights within them
o Bloggers may use some sort of license to clarify whether they want their material archived
o Provide incentives for the hosting sites to preserveo develop partnerships between hosting sites and
stewardship institutionso grant stewardship institutions the legal authority to
crawl the web for preservation purposes
Create public policies and or partnerships to enable grassroots efforts at preservation
Collective action will be needed to secure these assets
• public funding• public mandates
Action Agenda for Collectively Produced Web Content
1. Leading stewardship organizations should convene stakeholders and experts to address the selection and preservation needs of collectively produced Web content.
2. Creators, contributors, and host sites could lower barriers to third party archiving by using a default license to grant nonexclusive rights for archiving.
3. Regulatory authorities should create incentives, such as preservation subsidies, for host sites to preserve their own content or seek third-party archives as preservation partners.
4. Regulatory authorities should take expeditious action to reform legislation to grant authority to stewardship institutions to preserve at-risk Web content.
5. Leading stewardship organizations should develop partnerships with one or more major content providers to explore the technical, legal, and financial dimensions of long-term preservation.
Blue Ribbon Chapter 5 Which digital content to preserve, for how long, and for what
use? Who should be in charge? How to secure funding and resources? How to determine the return of investment?
Necessary conditions for sustainable digital preservation:1. recognition of the benefits of preservation2. choosing the materials that have long-term value3. incentives to act in the public interest4. appropriate governance to oversee the activities5. ongoing effort to preserve6. timely actions to ensure access
Principle of actions1. Create contingency plan for actions to preserve in advance
prevent risk of losing digital assets, and entrust the materials to a responsible party
set up mechanisms (eg. MOUs) to prompt regular review of preservation priorities
2. Argue for a need to invest in preservation emphasize the gains on possible usage of digital assets,
especially short-term also argue about the cost of not preserving the assets eg.
losing clinical trial data argue for potential benefits that will trickle to multiple
stakeholders3. Strengthen weak incentives, aligned the incentives when facing a
diverse stakeholder community, generate incentives when none exist
Principle of actions4. Prioritize the digital collections based on projected future use
careful selection of which digital assets to save, especially materials of greatest use to present & future stakeholders
the decision to preserve now need not be a permanent or open-ended commitment of resources over time
5. Stakeholders' roles & responsibilities should be transparent & accountable
organizations should have clear policies the specify their roles, responsibilities, and procedures
collective interest must be aggregated, and the effort & the cost must be appropriately apportioned
6. Funding models must fit the community norms digital assets need not always be a public good funding models should be flexible to adjust to disruptions over
time; create an economy of scale whenever possible (especially scientific data & cultural assets)
Near-term priorities Organizational action form public-private partnerships ensure organizations have required expertise achieve economies of scale & scope address the free-rider problem
Technical action build capacity to support stewardship reduce preservation cost operationalize an option strategy for all types of digital material
Public Policy action ease copyright laws to facilitate digital preservation generate incentives for private entities to preserve on behalf of the public sponsor public-private partnership empower stewardship organizations to avert loss of digital orphans
Public Outreach action provide training for curatorial skills educate public the urgency for preservation of digital assets
York and HathiTrust Website
Looks at the development of the HathiTrust
Challenges of a large-scale digital preservation initiative
Establishment and Purpose• Google• Members• Preservation
Goals
Question:
Looking at these areas, what are some of the major challenges you think might come about in developing digital preservation initiative?
The Challenges:GovernanceFinanceRepositoryServices
Challenges in Governance
Types of BAD collaborationo "Goal Drift"o No buy-in from administrative bodies
Tensiono Perception that collaboration will limit independence of
participantso Fear of slow decision-making process
Solution: HathiTrust Governanceo Executive Committeeo Strategic Advisory Boardo Constitutional Conventiono Voluntary Membership
Challenges in Finance
Funding Downfallso Voluntary Membership - Potential dissolution
of the partnershipo Minimal Funding Sourceso No long-term plan beyond 5 years
Solution:o Formal evaluation at the 3-year marko Will develop a succession and multi-year
funding plano Different Levels of partnership
Challenges with the Repository
Trusted Environmento Trusted Digital Repository Certification did not
existo Time and Cost of certification
Collaborative Developmento Discovering redundancyo What version is the right version?
Solution:o Certification, Standards, and Best Practiceo Implication of having a unified digital
repository
Challenges with ServicesBasic Access
o Print-disabled userso Compliance with accessibility standards
Searcho No interface for searchingo No comparable models for searching across
institutions of this magnitude
Extended Capabilitieso Integration with with software/primary source
collectionso Print on-demando Inter-institutional authentication and security
Critical Observations
GovernanceDuties of new governing bodies not explained in much detail
FinanceFailed to look at funding sources outside the partnership
RepositoryCost of long-term preservation sustainability
Walter – Cost of Not PreservingCost of digital preservation = 'benign neglect'; cultural either choose to preserve today, or defer the preservation to tomorrow benign neglect misses the fact that digital assets are vulnerable & storage
media are unstable
1. Cultural cost: intangible cost of narrow understanding of our cultures & histories by current
& future generations
2. Political cost: loss of resources & documentations essential for understanding local, state,
national, & international developments
3. Scientific cost: loss of data for all areas of research needed for academic advancement
Libraries that begin early towards digitization and content creation efforts will benefit from better acquisitions, more users, higher quality of users & financial resources increase their prestige & bottom line
The MetaArchive Cooperative Model
Founded in 2003 as a community-owned & operated digital preservation network
Cooperative model: all members contribute monetarily, staff, technology & space reduces cost for all cooperating parties & increases sense of joint ownership
expanding membership fees and cooperative-oriented staffing replace initial public funding from the Library of Congress
Adopt LOCKSS software: all members host servers within their institution, but are connected in a peer-to-peer network avoid a central cache
MetaArchive Members >50 institutions in 13 states & 4 countries
MetaArchive Cost1. Establish the 1st private LOCKSS network (with NDIIPP funding)2. Transform into a sustainable 501c3 charitable organization (with NHPRC &
NDIIPP funding)3. Provide ongoing preservation training & services to the cultural community
(with membership & consulting fees)
Cost components are mainly expert personnel4. Collaborative relationship-building5. planning & policy making6. staff training7. selecting & implementing network systems8. developing & maintaining software9. selecting digital assets for preservations10.documenting the digital assets11.preparing the assets for the preservation network12.assessing and monitoring the assets in the network13. infrastructure
Current cost
Basic costs: Equipment = $4600 for a server Staffing = 2% of a systems administrator’s time, software engineer Storage = $1/GB/year for network storage
Membership fees Sustaining members = $5500/year, typically lead institutions in the
field Preservation members = $3000/year, mainly participants &
beneficiaries
Sample costs:For an institution that want to preserve 2 TB of : Sustaining Member: [$5,500 (membership) +$2,000 (space) x 3
years] + $4,600 (server) = $27,100/3 years, or $9,033/year Preservation Member: [$3,000 (membership) + $2,000 (space)
x3 years] + $4,600 (server) = $19,600/3 years, or $6,533/year